#BlogTour ‘Dear Future Me’ by Deborah O’Connor

About the book…

In 2003 Mr. Danler’s high school class got an assignment to write letters to their future selves. Twenty years later they receive them in the mail. Upon opening them the students are shocked to find that their envelopes contain old secrets that threaten to expose the truth about the tragic death of one of their classmates—and when one letter leads a student, Miranda, to jump to her death, the small community is rocked to its core.

Stunned by what has happened and armed with a clue of her own, Miranda’s best-friend Audrey decides to track down her former classmates to get to the bottom of Miranda’s death.

In doing so, she sets off a chain of events that could expose the truth not just about one untimely death but two.

Hugest of thanks to Tracy Fenton of Compulsive Reads and Zaffre Books for the invite to read and review ‘Dear Future Me’ which is published on June 3rd in paperback and e-book formats.

In ‘Dear Future Me’ Deborah O’Connor has created a multi layered narrative which straddles past, and present for a class of school pupils undertaking a class assignment.

As readers, we meet them in the ‘now’ , when the letters, forgotten about, arrive on doorsteps and prompt some into action, and some to consider their life’s journey based on the ambitions the younger them had, versus the reality they have grown up with.

For one, it changes a normal family breakfast from a picture perfect, Instagram-able scene to unbearable tragedy.

Who sent these letters, and why?

The central protagonist is Audrey, one of the class whose ambitions and young potential has come to nothing-she missed out on the final year school trip where a fellow pupil died under terrible circumstances and missed out on her dream to study at Oxford due to circumstances beyond her control.

Now working as a cleaner, including for an ex-classmate, and seeing the difference between the haves and have nots, she uses her almost neutral, forgettable stance as a way to pry into the death from decades ago as well as the death that happened as a result of the letters the teenagers addressed to themselves.

Audrey’s friend, Miranda, who jumped off a cliff after having hers, has taken some of the pages to the grave with her-the pages she left behind give Audrey pause for thought that their friend, Ben, did not die from accidental means after all.

So as she sets about trying to reach out to all their former classmates, she begins to understand where each of them went , according to the ambitions and dreams the younger them had for themselves, and just what secrets have come back to haunt them.

I have been a huge fan of Deborah’s work since ‘The Dangerous Kind’ , and she knocks it out of the park yet again.

It looks on the surface, like a mystery and yes to all intents and purposes it is, because you want to know what happened at the 6th form trip and how it influenced someone who appeared to have it all, to take their own life.

It also shows how something done in innocence, where there was no thought of consequences, can come back, later in life to challenge your status and really make you think about how you came to be where you are.

Reading the letters that precede most of the chapters, you get this flavour of longing, of hope, and mostly to leave the small town world of Saltburn and spread your wings.

As a small town resident myself, I definitely related to Audrey’s feelings of perceived failure for what she hoped for herself, versus what she has achieved, and it definitely inspires introspection in the life of this reader.

Through the medium of a thriller, you become attached to, and moved by the journeys these disparate people take, and with Audrey as the principle narrator through whom we see the other , grown up members of her class, it’s difficult to decide whether or not she is a reliable narrator.

She cleans for others and this gives her control over her life and a sense of freedom that others, who have the perceived ‘charmed life’ of uni, marriage, children big house, career goals etc, find themselves trapped within a gilded cage.

The relative merits and bases of adult ‘success’ have rarely been looked at through such an interesting lens-I thoroughly enjoyed every minute lost in the pages of this book.

About the author…

Deborah O’Connor is a writer and TV producer. Born and bred in the North-East of England, in 2010 she completed the Faber Academy novel writing course.

She lives in London with her husband and daughter.

Twitter @deboc77 @Tr4cyF3nt0n @ZaffreBooks

Links-http://www.betteroffdeb.com